Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC detailled

Due to an early 2018 release in the Xiaomi Mi 7

During this year we have seen several new smartphones and with the new year we are wondering what kind of features we will find on the upcoming devices. Furthermore we are all curious to know what kind of SoC there will be in flagship models. Many devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Xiaomi Mi 7 have already been rumoured to include Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 845 SoC.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 has been the most dominant mobile chip on the market. This SoC can be found inside all the latest Samsung's Galaxy series including the S8 Plus and Note 8, as well as the Pixel 2 and the first Razer smartphone. At the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit the company has now revealed its new flagship successor Snapdragon 845 with various new or advanced features.

First off, the Snapdragon 845 improves a decent 25-30% compared to its predecessor on the performance side of things. This is made possible by higher clocks on the two quad-core clusters in big.LITTLE design, namely 2.8GHz for the performance cluster and 1.8GHz on the efficiency cores. Additionally, energy efficiency is said to be up by 30% in total. Furthermore, Qualcomm implements a new Secure Processing Unit which should improve security by having an isolated chip for security tasks like fingerprint/iris scanner or payments and SIM cards. Therefore, this unit boasts a dedicated processor next to its own memory and power supply.Finally, Qualcomm has also worked on the LTE modem and presents with the Snapdragon X20 a successor to the X16, thereby pushing connectivity speeds by an overall 20%.

The very first phone to use this new SoC is said to be the Xiaomi Mi 7. It should launch early 2018 alongside the Samsung Galaxy S9 and LG G7. Samsung, however, could be available once again with two different SoCs as the previous lineup. With the Galaxy S8 Samsung introduced two models, one available with their own Exynos SoC and another based on Snapdragon SoC.